


To All of My Children

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Fluff and Angst, Gen, POV Impala, Pre-Season/Series 11, sentimental squishy nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 02:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4330236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s someone new in her back seat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To All of My Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [propinquitous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/propinquitous/gifts).



> Inspired by [these spoilers for 11x04](http://themegalosaurus.tumblr.com/post/123933661693/).
> 
> Title from [Answers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b96rrbo-_Ik).

There’s someone new in her back seat.

He’s been there before, off and on. But he’s always felt insubstantial, somehow. Always like he already had one foot out her door.

Oh, he has bled here, she knows. He’s slept on her seats, face pressed against her window, breath fogging the glass. He has been here tired and hurting, he has waited patiently in her passenger seat, not quite himself.

But he is not a part of her like her boys are.

She’s known them for years, those two. She’s watched them grow, she has known the feel of infant feet, of toddlers’ sticky hands, of teenagers’ restless legs, of the aching limbs of adulthood. She has been there through it all, the quiet moments where John and Dean traded off driving while Sam slept in the back seat, the affectionate ones where Sam and Dean teased each other on long drives, the tense ones where they traded insults or insights. They’ve fought and cried and laughed and fucked and she has borne witness to it all. She remembers.

She loves them. And she knows that she, too, is loved.

John, for all his faults -- for she knows those, too -- John took good care of her, before, and Dean takes good care of her now. He keeps her shiny and new despite the fact she’s getting old, hand washes her with care. She knows this is a luxury. Dean runs his hands over her steering wheel, her dash, her leather. He plays her his favorite music, and when he sings along, she relishes the pleasant vibrations she feels down to her core. He smiles when he sits in the driver’s seat. He trusts her to take his loved ones wherever it is they need to go, this makeshift family he has built from the ground up, just like he has pieced her back together time and time again.

This, too, is a luxury. It is one she does not take for granted.

(There were times when Dean didn’t take such good care of her. Where he handled her roughly, slammed her brakes, jerked her steering wheel, let trash collect on her floor and her oil turn to sludge. But she knows those were times when he wasn’t even able to take care of himself. She understands. She doesn’t hold it against him.)

Sam has taken care of her, too, in his own way. He’s spent more time running on his own two feet than Dean has, but she knows it wasn’t from her. She doesn’t take it personally. During the times she’s been his, he cared for her well enough. He didn’t wash her by hand, didn’t talk to her like Dean did. But he kept her running. He upgraded her, made her his. His love is different from Dean’s, but it’s still there.

(She saw Sam save the world, once. She doesn’t know what he saw, when he looked at her. She hopes he was remembering all the moments of tenderness and joy and love that she would have told him about herself, if she could. She supposes it doesn’t matter. Whatever he saw was more than enough.)

And just as they have taken care of her, she has taken care of them. She has protected them from sun and rain and snow, she has taken them with their cuts and bruises and broken bones to countless hospitals, she has carried their bags and their weapons and their hearts.

She does not know this person in her back seat. But she is learning the shape of him, she is coming to recognize the new energy he is radiating. She is starting to understand the way he fits with Sam and Dean, hears it in the sound of his voice, feels it in the tenderness of his touches, senses it in the quirk of his smile and the tilt of his head. She knows what it is he’s feeling, the one who is named Castiel but who her boys call _Cas,_ just as she has a make and a model and an identification number but thinks of herself instead by the name Dean has given her, as _Baby._

She is happy to carry him, this man who cares for Dean and Sam as much as she does, who would do anything for them, who has already given so much of himself for their sakes. She loves him already, just as she loves these boys who she knows still consider her their home.

She hopes she feels like home to him, one day, too.

 


End file.
